I have zero complaints.

I ordered Starlink satellite internet service in February of 2021 and waited almost a full year for it to show up.

Due to where my family lives in rural Vermont, we have no other alternatives for internet service outside of satellite internet. There’s clearly a disconnect between the FCC statistics on broadband connectivity and the actual reality of living in the green mountain state.

Over the past 20 years, we’ve had multiple versions of offerings from both Hughesnet and Viasat. For a while, I even used hotspot devices from Verizon Wireless.

And then…Starlink, a match made in heaven, or at least, the sky.

The others

I’ve worked from home for the last 13 years as a tech consultant and freelancer. Solid internet service has been my lifeline.

Our first HughesNet dish 20 years ago was whatever their home plan was with a basic dish. I quickly upgraded to a business account which required spending over a thousand US dollars on the equipment. A few years later, I heard about Viasat. I went through the same upgrade process with them.

I won’t even go into what it’s like to deal with frustrated installers that show up in the afternoon only to still be trying 5 or 6 hours later to get things synced up and registered with each respective company’s satellite. It usually ended with an angry technician and less-than-stellar connectivity upon their departure.

Between the hardware and having to keep up with their data cap overages, our internet bill monthly ran around $400 (USD) monthly.

Yes, you read that correctly. We were paying nearly $5,000 (US) per year for access to the Internet.

Enter Starlink

The online ordering process to get on the waiting list was simple. Log in, create an account, enter my credit card info for the $99 reservation fee, and wait.

I had seen YouTube videos of other people unboxing their Starlink dishes. Many of them lived within the same general geographic coordinates as our home address. This kept me hopeful that my order would ship sooner than later.

I was even more excited about the fact that I would be able to install the system myself, completely foregoing the inevitably hostile installation technician.

The initial arrival estimate of my all-inclusive box of web access was the end of the summer of 2022.

Summer ended, no box.

A few months later, I received an email that it should be shipping soon and to keep an eye on my account for actual dates. Two months after that, the shipment notification was in my email.

The installation

On the day that the surprisingly small, gray box showed up on my porch in January, the temperatures were hovering well below zero degrees Fahrenheit.

I immediately texted a friend who had also signed up for the service but had yet to receive his.

 

It was brutally cold, but I was determined to get this thing up and running. I’d waited long enough and my current max Viasat download speed of right around 22mbps on the best day had me well prepared for this transition.

A quick slice through some packing tape and voila! There it was…packed in all its glory; a small rectangular satellite dish, a quad-pod mount, the wifi router, and 75 feet of cable. I also ordered the optional sidewall mount.

I’d already downloaded the app to my iPhone months ago and figured out where this tiny beast was going to be installed. The app made it extremely easy to determine what may or may not obstruct service.

I bundled myself up, leaned an extension ladder against the chosen exterior gable wall location, and went to work. There are trees around our property and I knew that getting the dish as high as possible was important so that they wouldn’t obstruct the signal.

Since I was getting rid of the current provider, I used the same hole through the wall for the Starlink cable to connect the dish outside with the router that would be placed inside the house.

Regarding the installation, there are only five parts to the system; the dish itself, the cable that goes between the dish and router, the router, the power cable, and whatever you choose for a mounting option whether it’s the included quad-pod or a different mount.

It’s important to ensure that the cable isn’t kinked or pulled too tightly around any corners. A relaxed cable routing is best. Be sure to use proper cable staples made for the cable so that it doesn’t get pinched. Any kinking, pinching, or extensive pulling of the cable can either reduce the speed of the system or cause it to not work at all.

Be sure to place the router in a central location avoiding as many interfering objects as possible. Keep in mind that the included cable is 75 feet long and plan the placement of the dish and router accordingly.

It’s also important to either plug the power cable into either a surge protector or power conditioner. This will help protect the system in the event of an outage. A further suggestion would be to connect it to a UPS battery backup unit. In the event of a power outage, your Starlink system will still be functional for as long a time as the UPS unit is rated.

One feature of the system is that the dish heats itself up based on the outside temperature so that snow and ice don’t build up on it. Where both of those are a thing where we live, this is a pretty big deal.

Once the dish was mounted and the cable connected, all that was left was to plug it in.

After a few seconds, the dish began to turn and move itself to properly align with the satellites. A minute or two later, the system showed online in the app.

The speed

I took the following screenshot of a speed test the morning after I installed Starlink. The temperature was -25 degrees Fahrenheit. Yes, that’s minus 25 degrees.

 

More recently, we experienced windchills of -50°F this past February. We live about 35 miles from Mount Washington, which set a new windchill record for the United States of 108 degrees below zero that same weekend.

It was pretty cold at our house, and Starlink never missed a beat.

This is a pretty big deal because the system specifications state operating temperatures of 30°C to 50°C (-22°F to 122°F).

On average, our download speeds range from 150–300 Mbps with upload speeds of 9–22 Mbps. The latency, referred to as ping in the screenshot above, or the round trip data time between the user and satellite, seems to average around 35 milliseconds.

Compared to our previous satellite provider options and witnessing first-hand latency of well over 600 milliseconds daily, this is a big deal.

If you’ve had satellite internet and ever clicked and waited for a page to load on a regular basis, or had your bank login timeout and didn’t understand why, latency was quite possibly the culprit.

As a technology consultant, I’m extremely well-versed in all things network. Whether it has a cable or not, everything has a transmit and receive speed and a latency factor.

For comparison, the following chart shows good latency for gaming:

 

Our Starlink latency falls more often than not within what is considered “good” for gaming.

WiFi Calling

In addition to good gaming latency, it appears that Starlink latency is also good for WiFi calling.

Along with living in a location where internet options are limited, cellular service also requires overcoming obstacles.

If the wind is just right and I stand outside a particular kitchen window, I can make a call. Because of this, I installed a cellular repeater in our house.

There are a few factors to consider in getting optimal results from a cell phone repeater. I’ll simply say that the working range of ours is very limited to a select area inside the house.

With previous satellite internet installations, we could make and receive calls over WiFi, but the latency made having an actual conversation almost impossible. The delay between when someone spoke and the other person heard it caused people to talk over each other along with breaks in the speech.

Having Starlink has completely changed that.

We now make and receive all of our calls over WiFi and no one on the other end is the wiser. The calls are clear and there’s no delay in the conversation. If we don’t mention it to whoever we’re talking to, they have no clue.

I also have regular video Zoom or Teams calls on my laptop with no issues.

Television streaming services

We’ve always had Dish Network for television service. As our kids grew up, Netflix became more and more of a thing, as did it using up our bandwidth in the first 10 days of the new internet service month. This quickly contributed to our $5k annual internet budget.

Starlink sent an email this past year to customers regarding its Fair Use Policy.

The email stated the following:

Customers who exceed 1 TB of data use on a monthly basis (currently < 10% of users) will automatically be switched to Basic Access for the remainder of the billing cycle, which means their data usage will be deprioritized during times of network congestion, resulting in slower speeds.

We had recently started using Netflix more often and had plans to completely cut the cord. In our case, that meant cutting the cordless cord as we had satellite television service as well. This new data cap at first concerned me, until I started to periodically take a look at our data usage.

With 3 iPhones, a couple of laptops, an Amazon Firestick, light Xbox usage and updates, whatever Dish Network updates occur along with all of our phone and video calls, we cap out at right around 400–500GB monthly.

That’s less than half of what the Fair Use Policy email warned us about.

We’ll be cutting the extra expense of satellite television without being concerned about data usage.

Are there ever any glitches or outages with Starlink?

Sure. Although, my experience is that they don’t happen often and anything over a few seconds is rare. Also, these outages almost always go unnoticed under normal internet usage. The app on my phone shows me every one of them whether it lasts two seconds or two minutes.

For the very few times in well over a year of service where a network issue has lasted a few minutes, it’s just that- a few minutes. It has never prompted me to contact customer service or required any more intervention than a quick reboot of the router or simply waiting for it to clear itself.

If you were able, you would also find that your current internet service provider has regular outages that go unnoticed by you as well.

Regarding Starlink’s customer service, I’ve come across posts where some customers have said that it’s less than stellar. I personally can’t attest to that or how good it might be as I’ve never once had to contact them in 15 months with the service.

Is it worth it?

From my experience, if you live in either a rural area where you find yourself plagued with slow speeds and data caps or someplace where your internet speed is less than stellar, it’s a resounding yes.

The equipment is $599. The monthly service cost is currently $90 for those in areas with excess capacity and $120 for those in areas with limited capacity.

There is currently no contract to sign and you can cancel the service at any time. You keep the equipment and that cost isn’t refundable.

The installation is actually rather simple. It really depends on your property and what obstacles exist. Many people are able to place it on their deck or on their lawn using one of the mounts available from Starlink. The key is having a clear view of the northern sky.

Portable and RV options are also now available for a small increase in the monthly service fee for those who wish to either use the system in multiple locations or while traveling.

It’s important to note at this time that Starlink isn’t currently available everywhere. You can order the service, get on the waitlist, or check availability on their website.

Conclusion and my final thoughts

On a planet with 5.1 billion internet users, it may be difficult for many to understand how Starlink has been life-changing for us.

No one in my family are strangers to lightning-fast internet. We have access to it everywhere we go, we just haven’t had access to it in our own household.

Thanks to Starlink, now we do.

 

*UPDATE: 6/19/23*

Still no issues or complaints. Since canceling our Dish Network account for television on 5/1/23 and  streaming all television services over Starlink (Netflix, Hulu, Paramount+, etc.), below is our all-inclusive data usage for one month. This includes television streaming, internet usage including working from home daily, wifi-calling, and light gaming.

*UPDATE: 10/11/23*

It’s been over a year and a half and we still have had the same positive experience. Our usage normally remains around 500GB +/- per month. The month of September was our heaviest usage and it seems that the bump was over the Labor Day holiday weekend.

Our neighbors who live down the road from us own an Airbnb that they also use themselves for a couple of months throughout the year. They were previously using HughesNet, but because of the poor internet speeds and latency, they weren’t able to come up to the mountains as often as they’d like while working remotely. They asked what we used for internet.

Last month, I installed their Starlink system for them. It’s been a complete game-changer for them and their guests.